In lieu of proper menus, small cards at each place setting proclaimed:
Welcome American Classroom!
Tonights [
sic
] Menu
Overture
Minestrone Soup or Filed [
sic
] Green Salads
Act 1
Chicken Paprika, Vegetable Compost [
sic
], Rice Pilaf
Act 2
Chocolate Zum-Zums drizzled with Raspberry Coulis
Note:
Vegetarians are welcome to exchange their Chicken for an
additional serving of rice or vegetables
Please notify your server
A frail and elderly waitress approached me with a pitcher of water in one hand and a pitcher of what looked like iced tea in the other. They were apparently heavy, for she strained to keep them both aloft. I had a vision of both her hands snapping off at the wrists.
“Iced tea or water.” She attempted to raise each pitcher as she named its contents, but the gesture was extremely subtle.
“Water, please,” I said.
As she poured the water in my glass she said, “And would you like soup or salad. You can’t have both.”
“May I ask you a question?”
She put both pitchers down on the table and wrung her hands. “What?” she said, unencouragingly.
“What are filed greens?”
“What?”
“It says here there’s a salad of filed greens. Can you tell me what they are?” I pointed to the word on the card, but she didn’t look at it.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s your basic salad. Lettuce. I’d recommend the soup.”
“I’ll have the filed greens,” I said. I had wanted to ask her about the vegetable compost and the Zum-Zums, but before I could she said, “Suit yourself,” hoisted her pitchers, and moved to the next table.
The first course was served quickly and almost immediately cleared, replaced with plates of chicken paprika, vegetable compost, and rice pilaf. The compost was simply that familiar and depressing medley of frozen carrots, corn, and lima beans. What made the rice a pilaf remained a mystery. As soon as everyone was served their entrées, the waitresses scurried away and the lights went down, and it was so dark you couldn’t even see your plate, let alone eat off it. Then a recorded voice welcomed us to the theater and reminded everyone to turn off their cell phones (which I found pretty ironic, given that we would be eating dinner throughout the performance). And then the curtain rose and the houselights were bumped up a bit so you could see to eat, and the play began.
The deviant play we were seeing was the female version of
The Odd Couple
, starring two middle-aged actresses who had once had respectable careers in movies, followed by less-respected careers playing moms on sitcoms, and then had disappeared for a while. I wondered if this was just another step on their descent into obscurity or if perhaps they had hit bottom and starring in a dinner theater production of
The Odd Couple
was the beginning of a comeback. And I wondered if it was their need of money or their desire for fame that prompted them to perform in this production. There was something very dignified and brave and sad about the entire thing—the idea of what people can be reduced to, how variable one’s life is, and the awful things people do to survive—a poignant subtext that was at complete odds with the play itself. This made watching it an upsetting experience.
And since I was on the top platform, by watching the play I also watched the audience. During the first ten or fifteen minutes everyone maintained an almost devotional raptness, but as the act continued, attention drifted away from the stage. People started eating their food, whispering to their neighbor, or not whispering to the person across the table from them. Every so often someone would hiss a piercing
shush
and silence would fall, but like a fire that had been insufficiently doused, the sounds of talking and eating would slowly flicker back into being.
When the act ended, everyone clapped madly to make up for their inattention, and then the ladies all got up and stampeded toward the women’s room. I needed to use the restroom, too, but before I could get up a strange thing happened. This girl named Nareem Jabbar, who was the other delegate from New York State, came up and sat down at my table. I actually sort of liked Nareem. She lived in Schenectady and was very smart and often asked unsettling questions at the conclusion of seminars.
She sat down in the chair across from me and said, “James, what are you doing?”
I wasn’t aware she knew my name, and she spoke to me as if we were very old, tight friends. I was disoriented. So I said nothing.
“James, James,” she said. “Talk to me. What are you doing, sitting here all alone?”
“What do you mean?” I asked. One of the reasons why I hate to talk to people is that when I am forced to talk I inevitably say something stupid.
“You’re always alone,” she said. “You’re sitting here all by yourself. We can’t have that. Come join us.”
This is something I really hate. Really, really hate—when people react to your being alone as some kind of problem for them. I knew the only reason she wanted me to come and sit at her table was that she wanted to do someone a favor. My sitting alone bothered her; it’s like how you resent those people standing up on the subway when you’re seated. It’s like they’re standing up just to make you feel bad. Sometimes there are even some seats available—half seats between big men with spread legs—but they won’t sit in them, they just stand in front of you and look exhausted and miserable and make you feel terrible because you’re sitting down. And I knew Nareem just wanted me to sit at her table because I was like some eyesore that prevented her from enjoying the show. I find it disturbing that so much seemingly altruistic behavior is really quite selfish. Even so-called saints like Mother Teresa bother me. In some ways she was just as ambitious as people like my father or anyone who wants to be at the top of their profession. Mother Teresa wanted to be the best saint, the top saint, so she did the most disgusting things she could do, and I know she helped people and relieved suffering and I’m not saying that’s bad, I’m just saying I think she was as selfish and ambitious as everyone else. The problem with thinking this way is that if you want to avoid this kind of ambition and selfishness you should do absolutely nothing—do no harm, but do no good either. Do nothing: don’t presume to interfere with the world. I know this makes practically no sense, but it’s what I was thinking when Nareem sat down at my table.
She must have sensed in my silence some sort of judgment or wariness (or idiocy), for she looked at me with genuine puzzlement, as if I might be a deaf-mute or something, and said, very slowly and distinctly, “There is room at our table. Would you like to join us?”
And then I realized she was really being nice. She was sincerely being nice. She was misguided, but she was being nice. But she didn’t know what she was saying, she was saying come sit at our table as if that was something I could do. As if I could get up and sit down at her table and become a person sitting at her table. As if becoming a person sitting at her table only involved getting up and walking down a platform and sitting at her table.
“No, thank you,” I said. “I’m fine alone.”
“So you’re a loser?” she said.
“What?” I couldn’t believe she had called me a loser.
“You’re a loner,” she said. “You like to be alone.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, that’s cool,” she said. “As long as you’re happy. But please feel free to join us whenever you’d like. Isn’t this play just about the suckiest thing you’ve ever seen?”
“Yes,” I said.
She sat there looking at me for a moment, and I could tell she was trying to decide if she should try to prolong our conversation—“draw me out,” I suppose—but apparently she decided I was beyond help. She stood up and returned to her table of laughing happy normal boys and girls.
I realized I had to get out of there. I stood up and passed through the tables. The lobby was full of happy chattering ladies. Outside the door a few people stood about smoking, hungrily sucking the nicotine out of their cigarettes. One of them was the congressman’s wife who had met my group at the train station. It had only been three days ago, but it seemed like ages. It’s weird how slowly time passes when you’re miserable.
“Where are you going?” she called to me as I passed by.
“Just for a little stroll,” I said. “To get some fresh air.”
“Well, don’t go too far,” she said. “We don’t want to lose you.”
I ran out into the middle of the parking lot and stood there for a moment, hidden between two hulking SUVs. I felt as if I had escaped from a house on fire; I was actually panting, and I thought if I turned around I would feel the hot bright conflagration of the strip mall. So I did not turn around, I ran across the parking lot and into the field behind it. I walked toward the center of the field—it wasn’t really a field, it might have been a field once, but now it was just a sort of open, abandoned, useless garbagy space. I thought how the center is defined by the spot farthest from every point of the perimeter. Since it wasn’t a very big field it did not take me long to reach its (supposed) center. I unzipped and peed fiercely, proudly, into the ground, as if that was the one thing I could do well. Then I looked around. The four sides of the field were bounded by the strip mall’s parking lot; a highway; a row of identical subdivision houses, the back of each exactly the same, except each house had a different pattern of lighted windows, like patterns of Braille spelling out different messages: baby’s asleep, daddy’s home, nobody’s home; and a long line of trees, obscuring whatever lay beyond them. I felt I was presented with four choices, four different places to go, and as I did not want to return to the theater, or look into the lighted windows of the subdivision, or expose myself to the glare and gore of the highway, the only remaining choice was the trees, and I ran toward them, before anyone could come chasing after me and force me back into the theater.
The trees were more substantial than I expected, and actually amassed themselves into something resembling a forest. Unlike the field, which was littered with the revolting effluvia of human lives, the forest seemed, at least in the dark, to be pristine. I don’t know why, but I often think about when any particular patch of ground was last touched by human feet or hands or regarded by human eyes. In the city, there’s a small area on the corner of LaGuardia Place and Houston Street that has been fenced in and allowed to return to its primordial state, before the Dutch bought Manhattan from the Indians for $24. I like to look at it when I pass by, although it just looks like an overgrown abandoned lot. But I always have this feeling that I’ll see something startling inside the fence—a fox or a turtle or a coyote or some animal that has miraculously returned to this little pristine patch of land. I think it’s because I want to know that time can move backward as well as forward. That we could return to that moment when Manhattan was, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words, “a fresh, green breast of the new world,” not the dirty brown crotch it is now. So I look every time I pass by, but usually all I see is Snapple bottles, used condoms, and losing Lotto tickets.
I walked deeper into the woods, down a slope, and into a sort of culvert, through which trickled a narrow stream. The stream smelled a little funky and I was glad it was dark, so I couldn’t see how polluted it was. I felt very weird and shaky and I couldn’t stop thinking of the strip mall in flames, so I squatted down and covered my face, pushing the heels of my hands into the sockets of my eyes. They fit perfectly, like two halves of a whole, and my hands were exactly the right size to cradle my skull. It seemed like another example of how well human beings are designed, that you were shaped to comfort yourself. I held myself like that and made a humming crooning sound that further removed me from the world.
After a while I remembered about the dinner theater and the bus and The American Classroom and the rest of my life. I had planned to return to the parking lot and wait until the play was over and get back on the bus with everyone else, but I knew in some weird way that by running away from the theater I had run away from much more than that, and that it was an irreversible action, that I had severed myself from The American Classroom as surely as if I had, like a fox caught in a trap, gnawed off a limb to limp away.
I knew that once in the bus they would realize I was missing, and Susan Porter Wright would remember seeing me at intermission, and I didn’t know what they would do, but I thought it best to get as far away from there as I could.
So I jumped over the little stream and climbed up the opposite side of the culvert and bushwhacked through the dark forest. I climbed over a chain-link fence into someone’s backyard. In the darkness I could make out a swing set a few feet in front of me, with a slide and two regular swings and one little kiddy one. And then I saw a baby sitting in that swing, toppled to one side, and I thought, Oh my God, someone’s left a baby in the swing! Then as I got closer I realized it wasn’t a baby, it was a doll. I felt like a moron and looked around as if someone might have been watching me and intuiting my thoughts. But there was no one around. I sat the doll up straight and gave the swing a hard push. At the apex of its flight the doll leaped out and flew brilliantly through the air and crash-landed on her skull in the middle of the lawn.